The Tragic, Unnecessary Death of an AOW Trainee

Last November, 18-year-old Linnea Mills embarked on a PADI Advanced Open Water Diver course in a Montana alpine lake with an instructor from Gull Dive Center in Missoula. As dive students do, she put her trust in those instructing her, and by doing so, she paid for it with her life. That's why her parents and other plaintiffs filed a $12 million lawsuit in May against those involved, including PADI.

Before you learn to drive a car, you are almost invariably aware of the driving environment, the road system, and many of the rules. Learning mainly involves commanding the vehicle in such a way as to make you a safe driver.

When you learn to scuba dive, you know nothing of the underwater environment, buoyancy, or the ramifications of breathing gas under pressure. These are the mysteries that are revealed to you by your diving guru - your diving instructor. You believe and trust everything your instructor tells you.

From the mid-1980s, I attended several diving instructor courses with different agencies, not only for my own certification, but also to research articles I was writing as a diving journalist. Diving had always been portrayed as a fun activity. Still, in the classes, no one ever stressed that the instructor had a grave responsibility when taking a student into the inhospitable underwater environment. Nobody ever said that someone might die while being trained.

Later, I taught diving in Spain, where, under Napoleonic Law, instructors risked being incarcerated after any incident, pending proof that they were innocent. It focused the mind, and during my teaching I never had any such incident.

In Europe, professional diving instruction is now strictly regulated. Not only do instructors need to be appropriately qualified, but also they must undergo an annual health check, have up-to-date life-saving skills, and have therapeutic oxygen available at the dive site. They must carry an independent, alternate breathing source (not just an octopus rig) and be assisted by a suitably qualified person. There must also be a responsible person at the surface and a detailed log kept. Breaches of the rules can result in heavy fines or worse. Not so in the Land-of-the-Free, where from PADI to the dive store to the instructor, it can sometimes look like the Wild West.

When Linnea Mills died, she was wearing a recently purchased second-hand drysuit without its essential inflation hose. It was the first time she had used the suit, and she was unaware she needed an inflation hose. Her instructor, Debbie Snow, who herself was wearing a drysuit (so one must presume she understood the ramifications of diving in a drysuit without suit inflation), had entered the water when Liston noticed the missing hose and yelled to Snow, asking what to do. She said it was OK for Mills to dive without the inflator hose. Mills could wear a BCD and use it for buoyancy -- and that was only one of the many negligent moves that led to her death in 100 feet of water.

For the benefit of Undercurrent readers who have no experience in drysuit diving, let me explain how they function. Typically, membrane drysuits provide no insulation, so to stay warm, the diver wears garments underneath. The suit's volume, and, therefore, its displacement (buoyancy), is kept constant by adding air as the suit otherwise compresses during a descent. Upon ascent, the diver releases the air as it expands. The air is normally fed from the diver's own tank by a direct-feed hose.

When Snow instructed Mills to use her BCD for buoyancy control, she was essentially telling her to use the drysuit as if it were a wetsuit.

Alas, as Mills descended, the air in the suit would have been compressed, and the deeper she went, the tighter the suit got, crushing her body and ribcage and making it feel difficult to breathe. Where there were folds or creases in the material, extensive skin bruising could have occurred. Furthermore, the air in the drysuit contained within the insulating clothing provides insulation, so Mills would have also become very cold. But, none of this should have been fatal. I, too, once dived once without a direct-feed hose, and forgetting it proved a painful lesson, not ever to be repeated.

Debbie Snow had been a PADI instructor for about a year, learning in the warm waters of Florida. Her Montana assistant, 22- year-old Seth Liston, held only a Junior Open Water Diver Certification but was allegedly training to be a divemaster. For this course, they had chosen a spot on Lake McDonald in freezing temperatures. Had they been properly registered with the National Park Service, as a commercial business is required, they would have been told the Lodge was closed, and there were no emergency services or cell phone service.

Snow was actually teaching a drysuit specialty course to two other students, Bob and E.G., who had met previously to learn the ins and outs of drysuit diving. On this day, Mills had been invited to join them, although she was seeking her Advanced Open Water certification. To get the inexperienced Mills submerged, Snow loaded her down with 44 lbs. of lead, which she placed in her BCD pockets and zippered drysuit pockets, so it was not instantly ditchable. (That's a lot of lead. For example, I am 6'4" tall and weigh 210 lbs, and the most lead I have used with a drysuit is 30 lbs.)

It's not uncommon for instructors to overload new trainees with lead during pool training to allow them to sit comfortably on the bottom of a shallow pool. In a lake hundreds of feet deep, it's a recipe for disaster. Mills, a slightly built teenager, was not knowledgeable enough to question this amount of weight or how it was stowed. She trusted her instructors. After all, did they not know best?"

To add a layer of insanity to the proceedings, the dive began at 5 pm, about 20 minutes before sunset. Bob and E.G. entered the frigid gloomy water with instructor Snow. Liston and Linnea entered later. Mills and two other divers did not have dive lights.

The divers descended. While Mills struggled to get her buoyancy trimmed but couldn't, Snow was consumed with one of the drysuit trainees who was having so much difficulty Snow had to drag her around by her tank yoke. Mills dropped to a ledge at 60 feet, clearly distressed. Liston and another diver were close enough to touch her but offered no assistance; they began to ascend, and Mills tried to follow but could not. Snow swam by a couple times, unaware of Mills' problems because she was otherwise engrossed. Mills tried to get aid from another diver but fell back off the ledge and eventually plummeted 120 feet. Bob went after her and spent 90 seconds trying to save Mills' life but did not know where her weights were stored. Mills dropped her regulator, and Bob tried to share air with her, unsuccessfully, then tried to use brute force to help her ascend. His heroic effort failed.

When Bob reached the surface, no one was there. Snow eventually surfaced, and when Bob told her what had happened, Snow dived down but could not locate Mills. Snow returned to shore, and she and Liston got new tanks and made a second dive, finding Mills at 127 feet; she had to remove Mills' BCD to get her to the surface.

After the dive, Liston and Snow were airlifted to Seattle for treatment of potential injuries. Snow fabricated stories about the cause of death, and the owners of Gull Diving apparently threatened witnesses. The ground shifted when it became known that Bob's GoPro had captured much of the incident, and the defendants' stories changed, and a lawsuit was filed for wrongful death.

Incredibly, Snow later told a National Parks Services special agent Kurtis Kennedy, investigating the incident, she didn't know what had gone wrong.

There's much more to this ugly story, including PADI's significant role with their confusing rules and regulations for training. And, in my mind, it raises the question of whether scuba diving instruction and those who provide it in the USA should be adequately regulated by someone other than the self-serving agencies themselves? Barbers and hairdressers are regulated by local governments, so they don't harm their customers. The instructor leading a drysuit dive in a cold-water lake - or leading 14-year-olds on their first dive in an ocean - is not regulated at all.

Without regulation, should the outcome of a tragic event just be left to litigation? Do American divers and potential divers just prefer Caveat Emptor - let the buyer beware - even when lives are seriously threatened? That seems to be PADI's preference.

You can learn more about the details of this lawsuit and why, in the plaintiff's eyes, PADI is culpable too, by reading the full wrongful death suit brought against the instructor, the dive store, the seller of the drysuit, and PADI.

Here's the link to the entire lawsuit. You be the judge. www.undercurrent.org/LinneaMills

- John Bantin

P.S.: The U.S. government looked into whether Debbie Snow had criminal culpability. Karla Painter, an assistant to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Montana, decided against prosecuting, writing, "While Snow was likely at fault to some extent for the death of Mills, we cannot prove beyond reasonable doubt that she was criminally culpable."